There's a lot of shit flying in the #Fediverse lately and a lot of times perspective seems to get lost. Yes, there are things we need to talk about, and yes there are things we will not agree on. And that's okay.
But leave the pitchforks and torches out of this.
Fedi admins put in the hours and effort and emotion into making fedi happen. Sometimes they make decisions we might not agree with. We should criticize, but we should not pile-on.
I feel embarrassed and bad about my role in this latest kerfuffle. A question was asked, I responded strongly as I often do, and that got its own life.
I am disappointed in myself (because I should have been more careful with words, with the platform I have around here), but also in fedi (because we all should know to be excellent to each other).
No, nobody is trying to "sell out" fedi. Nobody is being "paid off" by some corpo. There is no need for digging trenches and laying barbed wire.
Totally appreciate the sentiment and the call to calm down. However, there's an elephant in the room which these calls for calm ignore.
The elephant in the room is the NDA. Because these discussions happened under NDAs, we have no way of knowing anything about what the discussions involved. We don't know what the reality is.
The talks might have been 100% harmless, they might have been 100% sell-outs, they might have been something else. But there is absolutely no way of knowing. The reason people are speculating is because NDAs force them to speculate.
"we need to be able to have this conversation"
How do we have a conversation if the participants have signed a legal agreement with Meta/Facebook not to discuss what happened?
@rysiek It's quite astonishing to see to what degree Meta's way of doing things is causing real damage to fedi before they even connected anything real to it. Doesn't exactly make me look forward to more news from this direction.
There is a need for a longer conversation about the stuff that the kerfuffle relates to.
But it has to be a conversation, not a shouting match. People are throwing accusations and making conjectures that have nothing to do with reality!
And we need to be able to have this conversation without pushing out people most engaged in maintaining the infrastructure we use to have this conversation.
There is a way to do all that, but for that we need to take a step back, and take a deep breath.
@rysiek Then agree to block Meta for now if it is released in the meantime. We can all have that talk then unblock or not once an open, honest, calm conversation with the wider Fediverse, not just a select few instance runners can be had.
@Matt5sean3 that's the longer conversation we need to have. But I do not want to have it in this thread, as I've been having it, pretty heated, in many other threads over the last few days.
I would appreciate if we could leave this one thread for focusing on calming down a bit and lowering the temperature, please.
@rysiek And that was my suggestion for an easily reversible action to allow that calming to happen. If nothing else it will let people know they are not being brushed off. The calming cannot happen without something like that.
@Matt5sean3 no, I think it is reasonable to ask people to stop pulling stuff out of thin air and accusing random people of stuff for which there is not a shred of corroboration.
If you want to discuss blocks, pledges, etc, I would appreciate if you respected my request from before and started your own thread.
@rysiek Then enjoy the continued furor. Quite fundamentally, telling people to calm down when you refuse to act to address the concerns is not a practical stance. There are secrets being kept, that we know. It is by design that people are left only with speculation.
@rysiek Some real transparency would solve a lot of this, most of the kerfuffle seems to be being caused by the lack of clarity and transparency. NDAs aren't going to help that and it sort of starts to create a priest class (with both power and secret knowledge that isn't transmitted) if we're going to talk about the social aspects of this. Communication issues and lack of clarity always give rise to speculation, especially if people are being looked down on by the newly forming priestly class! (To be clear, I'm using priestly class here to illustrate the social dynamics, I don't necessarily think any of whoever was involved in the meta talks was trying to become this at all, it's just what can happen when there's secret knowledge and people feel shut out.) It doesn't help that there's been some sneering at people who voice concerns (on either side of the forming divide).
@fifilamoura yes, this is the broader conversation, that I am not necessarily wanting to have in this particular thread. There's plenty of threads about that, I'd like this one to be about calming down, taking a step back, and taking a deep breath.
@rysiek Some of the behavior I’ve seen about this particular issue has been disappointing. I saw some people get ridiculed for having calm, rational opinions (from my perspective) about the matter. Like vitriol for saying ‘We don’t even know what is happening or if this will even be a thing yet’.
If I want that kind of behavior, I can get that over at the twitter machine.
And to make this abundantly clear… regardless of how much you disagree with a person and how much you feel their decisions might be wrong:
👉 harassment is harassment, and is unacceptable
👉 calling for harm is calling for harm, and is unacceptable
👉 pile-ons are pile-ons, and are unacceptable
People who engage in that sort of thing are like locusts. They join a community, destroy it, and move on.
If you care about fedi, push back against that, even if it targets someone you disagree with.
How can you identify and opt out of joining a pile-on if you cannot see other replies? I saw a post by someone I disagreed with and wanted to reply. There was only 1 reply I could see and it only captured part of what I wanted to say. But then I saw the OP asking that nobody else reply, so I guess there was an invisible pile-on underway.
@derznovich that's an issue, and I fell into the same trap myself a few times.
One way is to respect the request from the person, once you see it. It's really that simple. They might make it in a reply to their own toot, or they might make it as an edit on the original toot.
Respecting such an ask and just moving on is already a lot. Because a lot of people just flat out refuse and double down. And that's when it really crosses the line.
@rysiek "pay Gargron or he'll sell you out, also lol he already met with them without telling anyone first so it's moot, but like still let's shame you for not paying him" is truly a universe brained stance
How about: don't feed your users to the exact thing they're escaping on principle, and if you need more money make that clear, and don't confuse the two.
Violating someone's trust because you feel owed money is how embezzlement starts.
@wilbr the way you twist the words and the spirit of my toot to do a shitty hot-take just so that you can take a jab at a particular person you seem to not be a big fan of is exactly the kind of shitty behavior my whole thread is about.
@rysiek I'm not twisting anything for a hot take, I'm responding with my perspective. No amount of donor $ is going to keep a person from talking with fascist social media, if they're the sorts of people who are willing to do do or motivated by money. Facebook has all the money, our contributions are a drop in that ocean.
You talk about not laying barbed wire: reread your thread but pretend it's Nazis vs Allies. That's how many of us feel. We fedi as anti-fascism, not cuz making apps is fun.
@wilbr I've been on fedi since before it was called fedi, been involved in the digital human rights activism for a decade and a half, but yes please do go on and explain to me how this all works. 🙄
@rysiek then how did you miss the memo on giving fascist social media no quarter lest they infect and ruin all of our hard work? Did you just join up so you could eventually sell out to the very thing we're escaping? Are you unaware of the very real harm these companies have and continue to cause? There is no wait and see, there is no moderate position, we either hold the line or be consumed. It's happened many many many many many times before, I thought we were clear on this by now.
@wilbr you seem to be missing the part of my thread where I say we do need a conversation about this.
And also you seem to be making assumptions about my stance in all of this. Might want to scroll through my profile a bit, I left breadcrumbs!
Instead, you're just jumping into my replies, effectively calling me a n00b and a fascist supporter, and ignore everything I said in the thread you reply in. Which is just shitty behavior.
You want to rant, go rant in your own thread. Good luck.
@rysiek you're saying not to lay down trenches and barbed wire and implying that I have just a few disagreements over some people's reasonable opinions. I'm saying the trench was dug when ActivityPub was written and the barbed wire was laid when we said this would be a place that could be Nazi-free, because of defederation. Having a polite "conversation" about these fundamental "disagreements" now is just equivocating in the face of the enemy as they advance.
@wilbr well since you clearly understand what I said better than I did, and since you clearly know everything there is to know and understand about this, and since you don't think having polite conversations makes sense, I guess we're done here.
Fun talking to you, I have not been mansplained to about Facebook and related stuff for a long, long time. :blobcatgiggle:
And since subtle suggestions that you perhaps could take your rants somewhere else do not seem to work, plonk.
@rysiek "fedi admins do lots of work and may make decisions we may not agree with" erases the years of work marginalized LGBT+ fedi programmers did creating fedi technology in order to keep the likes of Elon, Zuck, and Thiel as far away as physically possible on this dystopian hellscape of a planet. Why else would anyone go to the trouble? So no, coming in and saying "aw why NOT play nice with what you went to all this to escape" gets the gulag. "Why NOT let the zombies in the front gate?"
@rysiek I have no idea who the particular person you think is that I'm jabbing at. I finally got on the other side of the zombie fence and not two minutes in I'm hearing zombie centrists talk about how all bipedalists have rights, living or undead, and we shouldn't be so extreme, maybe we can hear each other out?
No. That's a position that brings death. That's the position of a zombie apologist at best, zombie spy at worst. You like em? Go back to Facebook. They already have their own app.
@wilbr I have never had a Facebook account in my life. And I was talking about how Facebook is a monopoly back when the hacker community itself was not convinced about that: https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-
But sure, I'll "go back to Facebook."
Do you have any other thoughts you'd like to share with me? I'm eager to learn!
@rysiek
Don't forget to offer help moderating, write docs, do other stuff that is useful.
Your instance runs fine?
Maybe pixelfed, peertube or others need help :)
Even helping other instances might be good, there are plenty of good people here, lets help them keep this place afloat.
@TonyStark thank you. The drama subsided somewhat; it's still there but it's mostly calmed down. The discourse seems to have moved in a more constructive direction.
@trebach@inherentlee@rysiek I came on last night just in time to see someone suggest that "we should all" send one particular admin images of his cat being tortured.
@maegul perhaps it's not the best of ideas to publicly discuss whether specific people were targeted with specific forms of harassment? Just a thought.
Fair! Didn’t at him for obvious reasons, and figured drumming up support for him would be a good thing (especially to kissane’s point that so much goes unseen and invisible). But I’ll delete the post to be safe. Thanks for the feedback!
Sure, but it’s noisy out there, and when things cross lines it’s good to know so that people can react appropriately. For me, something like this happening should prompt everyone that knows the subject to do something nice supportive and defensive, which is important for establishing norms. IRL, something like that would happen, but as kissane highlights, we’ve got a weirdness here.
So many Passionate Defenders of the Federated Universe seem to miss the whole point of the federated universe; it's a bunch of different servers that talk to each other.
There is no "we".
You can always start up different servers and make different connections, but if you want to allow everyone to start up servers and make connections you can't stop some people from starting servers and making connections, you can only choose not to deal with them.
If you want to live in a world where you don’t support companies that “do evil” - it’s time for you live off the grid and grow your own food because starting with the carbon energy infrastructure through our industrial food and clothing production to transportation, construction and healthcare, evil acting companies permeate our daily lives.
For me exposing people on FB to a “better way” in the #fediverse is a no-brainer.
@amart I feel it's more nuanced than this, actually, and I don't think this "go live off grid" imagery is helpful for this conversation.
Instead of finding ways of painting one "side" or the other by a particular broad, over-simplified brush, how about we listen to each other and try to understand each other's point of view?
Some fedi admins make fedi happen, others break fedi. Not all of them are good, and not all of them are bad.
If you want to choose your community and who can talk to you then you don't need someone else to do this work. There is no need for fedi admins if you use a single-user instance.
If so many admins put so much effort into making decisions for other people then let's decentralize this case too. Let's get rid of admins at all. And let everyone decide.
@nk as much as I would love fedi to be ever more decentralized, I am also a sysadmin and I understand how much work running an instance, even a single user instance, takes.
So I will continue to appreciate the fedi admins, and you do you.
@rysiek The pile-on that has been going on is ugly and thank you for saying something. Admns put in a lot of time, money, and energy. I’ve only been here since October and I really think those who recently joined should think twice before making accusations about people they know nothing about. Hope people cool down.
@radpanda@rysiek admins of some some of the way too big instances met with facebook people to discuss… probably facebooks new AP-speaking product? Noone outside of them knows really, as it was behind closed doors and behind NDAs
@ar@radpanda@rysiek also some big instances are defederating from eachother, which caused further disagreement. Also some admins are not signing an agreement to pre-block metas project
@MagicLike@ar@rysiek I see. It looks to me like a clash between people what the Fediverse is or should be going forward. It saddens me that some people are ready to push others into misery just to prove their point.
@rysiek@radpanda@MagicLike@ar bots have surpassed us in being the worst. It's getting harder to check who's a bot, and some will just try to argue to cause trouble. Others will argue because they copy people arguing.
@radpanda@rysiek There is a group of people who are admins of some of the largest Fediverse instances who took a meeting with Meta under an NDA and people are really frustrated about them appearing to be in cahoots with Meta ahead of the release of P92/Threads.
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